Sam Dunn and Scot McFayden are to heavy metal documentaries what Spielberg and Scorsese are to quality drama. Except these two work together.

The Banger Films duo, who made the award-winning docs Iron Maiden: Flight 666 and Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, are thrashing their way through musical history with an 11-part TV series called Metal Evolution. If you haven’t made it appointment viewing yet, put down your Mastodon record and find the DVR remote.

“When we did our first film (2005’s Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey), we realized we created something that filled a need — people wanted a film about metal with some intellectual weight and depth,” Dunn told Wired.com. The pair mined that original philosophy for their new VH1 Classics show, which features interviews with metal gods old and new. “It’s not just for the diehard metalhead but for rock fans who want to know about distortion or what Vivaldi has to do with metal music. It’s a story about the evolution of a genre.”

While it has always had its hard-core adherents, heavy metal has enjoyed a recent resurgence as headbangers age and a new generation of headbangers grows up with easy access to the sludgy sounds of legendary bands like Black Sabbath, Motörhead and Iron Maiden. Once banished to culture’s periphery, tunes with sledgehammer riffs, screaming vocals and lyrics about drugs, wizards and nuclear apocalypse now can be heard in movies and TV commercials or conjured instantly on streaming music services.

Mining Metal’s History

Metal Evolution started at the genre’s beginnings when its first episode aired in November. The idea for the show sprang from the metal family tree found in Dunn and McFayden’s first film. The metal infographic categorized bands and made connections that casual fans wouldn’t normally see.

When the duo were discussing future projects, the approach seemed like a natural fit. They approached VH1 and the network was sold on the idea — 11 episodes, with a full hour on each metal subgenre. (See some of their interview subjects in the gallery above.)

“We wanted to surprise people with connections that exist between metal and other music,” Dunn said. “For example, Dick Dale and his surf guitar in the early ’60s, that shredding approach, the fast picking and tone, it set the template for a lot of metal that’s come about for the last 40 years. It’s hard to think of James Hetfield‘s guitar without thinking about Dick Dale’s.”

Metal Evolution‘s goal is to provide a bigger perspective on an often misunderstood genre.

That daunting task meant lots of work for Dunn and McFayden. They started writing and researching for the project in late 2009 and were still putting the finishing touches on the series’ final episodes last month.

The vast amount of time and energy expended led to the most complete exploration of metal to date — so much so that even metal aficionado Dunn learned new things as they went.

“I grew up as a fan of a lot of heavier ’80s metal styles, so a big surprise was the influence from bands like MC5 or Iggy Pop, early American bands that tended to be associated with punk instead of metal,” he said. “There’s an intensity to what they were doing and an attitude — no holds barred, not virtuosity or playing — that also influenced people who went on to play metal music. And if you listen to the quality of the early Stooges‘ riffs, they have the plodding, repetitive, low-end feel to what they were doing. That music was really heavy at the time.”

In any given episode of Metal Evolution you can see interviews with metal icons like Hetfield and tangential artists like Iggy Pop, but also many unexpected faces. So far, six episodes have aired and the rest run through early 2012.

“One of the strongest episodes is ‘Shock Rock’ — it’s the only episode not about sound,” Dunn said. “It’s about performance, spectacle and theatricality. It goes way back to Coney Island and P.T. Barnum — he realized people will pay to be freaked out.”

Artists like Arthur Brown, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Kiss, Marilyn Manson and Slipknot took that concept and ran with it.

Following the evolution of elaborate shows makes you “realize how important stage presence and spectacle is to rock music,” Dunn said.

Dunn admits Banger Films came around at the right time, with metal undergoing a resurgence fueled, in part, by technology and the internet (in addition to head-banging moms and dads turning their children on to bands like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden).

“When I grew up, you were a metalhead, a punk, a jock or a skater. You couldn’t be a mixture,” Dunn said. “Now kids will listen to five different genres within five songs on an iPod. When you see a band like Mastodon on Letterman, it says a lot of people are exposed to those bands more easily than in the ’80s when you had to blindly pick up Venom’s Welcome to Hell.”